Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg thinks it’s possible to eliminate all vehicular fatalities and even serious accidents in America. He has embraced a program and philosophical approach to traffic that began in Sweden called “Vision Zero.” His Cabinet department is spreading funds around to state and local departments of transportation that embrace this concept.
At the same time, Buttigieg acknowledges that traffic trend lines are headed in the exact opposite direction.
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“Traffic crashes cost tens of thousands of American lives a year, a national crisis on our roadways, and everyone has an important role to play in addressing it,” the transportation secretary said in a February statement. Buttigieg went on to issue a “national call to action ... asking all Americans — including private industry, nonprofit and advocacy organizations, and every level of government — to join us in acting to save lives on our roadways.”
This call to action, coupled with significant funding, has local governments scrambling to out-Vision Zero one another.
Montgomery County, Maryland, bragged that it was “one of the first county governments in the United States to initiate a Vision Zero plan. The county has put resources in place to eliminate serious and fatal collisions on county roads for vehicle occupants (drivers and passengers), pedestrians, and bicyclists by the end of 2030.”
The Seattle Department of Transportation noted, “We launched Vision Zero in 2015 and continue to evolve our approach based on best practices and in service of the City’s equally aggressive and important climate action and racial equity goals.”
Not to be outdone, the website for the Big Apple says, “Since 2014, Vision Zero in New York City has brought traffic deaths to historic lows and changed the culture on our streets through a comprehensive program of engineering, education, and enforcement.”
Some transportation experts are skeptical that all of these commitments will amount to much in terms of fewer traffic deaths.
“Vision Zero in the U.S. has so far been more about slogans than safety solutions,” Marc Scribner, transportation policy analyst for the Reason Foundation, told the Washington Examiner. “Campaigns generally haven’t targeted the most severe safety problems, so it isn’t very surprising that the proliferation of Vision Zero commitments from public officials has coincided with the worst road safety trends in modern history.”
National traffic deaths saw a significant spike during the pandemic. Fatalities rose from 39,107 in 2019 to 42,329 in 2020, when most roads were practically empty for several months during the COVID-19 pandemic, to 46,980 in 2021, according to National Safety Council data.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration believes things might not have gotten worse in 2022. Still, the headline for the agency news release highlights the ongoing problem: “NHTSA Estimates for 2022 Show Roadway Fatalities Remain Flat After Two Years of Dramatic Increases.”
One outgrowth of the Vision Zero movement is the Safe Streets and Roads for All, or SS4A, program. This was part of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and makes $5 billion available over five years to fund “regional, local, and Tribal initiatives through grants to prevent roadway deaths and serious injuries,” according to the Department of Transportation.
For now, Vision Zero means three things in practice for American locales that embrace the concept: more bike lanes, lower speed limits, and more speeding tickets.
The city of Norfolk, Virginia, is competing for that $1 billion pie along with so many other local governments. It explains the rationale for lower speed limits on its website, which urges locals, “Let’s put Norfolk on the map!”
“As people travel faster, the risk of death or serious injury rises dramatically when crashes occur,” Norfolk explains. “A pedestrian struck by a car driving at 40 mph is 8 times more likely to die than a pedestrian struck by a car driving at 20 mph.”
Even worse, the city warns, “Speed also impacts a driver’s peripheral vision.” For instance, someone driving at 70 mph “has a much narrower line of sight than a driver traveling at 25 mph.”
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In June, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department in North Carolina put up two speed traps, advertised them on social media, and tagged the state Vision Zero program in the post.
These southern speed traps sprang up after the city of Charlotte “received a $4.4 million grant from the federal government for Vision Zero” in January, reported the local television station WBTV.